Modernly, the use of PCs (personal computers), including so-called laptop and notebook computers, is increasingly common and the computers themselves are of increasing computer powerful, decreasing thermal power and ever more complex.
A vast majority of PCs have a controlling software, for example an OS (Operating System) such as Microsoft® Windows® Vista® or a like commercial product. Many varieties of OS are available largely due to the need to make design tradeoffs. In particular, feature richness with attendant complexity and size is traded off against (relatively) limited capabilities with increased speed (especially speed of operation and of load time).
Thus a need has existed to provide for the use of multiple OS within a computer and various approaches, each with its own tradeoffs, have been used.
One approach, disclosed in the U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 61/210,578, filed on Mar. 20, 2009 for a patent and which is hereby included by this reference, provided for OS interchange in a non-virtualized environment.
When implementing such a system a need for enhanced memory management exists to avoid or mitigate inflexible partitioning of system memory between OSes.